Space is at a premium in retail stores. You are lucky to get shelf space at all, let alone more than one space or “facing.” Brands can get pushed around by the competition, mispriced by the store, not reordered even though they are selling well, and stay in the back room and never make it to the shelf. So just “making it to the shelf” is an achievement.

You work your way up from the bottom shelf, where folks generally don’t look, to the eyelevel shelf. Eyelevel is the most coveted real-estate in the store because it’s where the customer naturally looks. We used to say, “If you’re not in their face, you’re not in the place!” But now that you made it, anything that is wrong with your label or packaging works against you.

For one thing, you can’t be in every store to inspect every one of your products, although you should try! Even though you have great quality control in your production facility, once it leaves the condition of your label is in the hands of folks who can scratch it, scuff it, and stain it between the back room and the shelf.

That label damage can impact sales in many ways:

1. First Impressions. A scuffed or otherwise compromised label or package can turn off a potential first time customer. “The product is still good; it’s just the label that got a little scuffed.” You want to say that, but you can’t! So customers buy another product with a pristine label.
2. Sales Blocking. If you have only one space on the shelf, you are at the mercy of the condition of the label that’s in front of your narrow line of products. If that label isn’t perfect, she won’t pull that one out and grab the one behind it. She will buy another brand. The sales of all your other products lined up single file behind the one in front with the scuffed label are stopped.
3. Spoils Pick Ups. The retailer will eventually notice that your sales have stopped and want to discontinue your product. But you will send a representative to that store to see why sales have stopped. You will have to pick up what the retailer considers spoils, or damaged goods if you want to continue in his store.
4. Lost Customers. You can even lose previously loyal customers due to a scuffed label. They may feel the quality is going down and try another brand in your category, like it, and leave you. All because of a damaged package.
5. Deliberate Damage. We sometimes discovered deliberate damage from competitors who knew the effects of an imperfect label. This is yet another reason for constant vigilance at the store level.

Here’s a tip we found very useful: If the label got scuffed, it was usually on the edges. So we avoided the appearance of most label scuffing with labels that were white on the edges, the same color as the paper underneath the printed image. Thus, many of the scuffs were not visible because we allowed a lot of white space around the edges.

But there’s no replacement for actually being there at the shelf once a week!

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Label Damage Screams “Damaged Goods” to Your Customer appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.

Co-Founder of Barefoot Wine

Chances are, if you’re a wine drinker, you’ve gone Barefoot. You know the wine—the big bottle, the label’s bare footprint, the original flavors of red or white. The whole, “Get Barefoot and have a great time!” slogan.

Now Michael Houlihan—an Oakland product and 1963 Bishop O’Dowd High School grad—who co-founded Barefoot Wine with his longtime companion, Bonnie Harvey, has put his stamp on something besides a wine label: a book.

Titled The Barefoot Spirit, Houlihan and Harvey’s book (oops, “a business adventure story,” Houlihan says with emphasis) details not only how Barefoot Wine became a number one selling brand with no paid advertising, but also what it takes for small companies to succeed. And Houlihan should know: He and Harvey introduced Barefoot in 1986 and eventually sold what had become one of the nation’s top-selling brands to E. & J. Gallo in 2005.

After reminiscing with this writer about how she first encountered the wine at a 1994 Los Angeles wedding seated between two clown school graduates—yes, really—Houlihan sat down and answered a few of our more pressing questions.

Q: We love the fact that you grew up in Montclair in Oakland and that you went to Bishop O’Dowd. What kind of student were you? Did you have a class yearbook or annual where you were voted most likely to change the world through wine?

A: I was basically more of a student type of guy. I took classes seriously, got good grades. I knew high school wasn’t going to last very long. One thing, though, I won the student speakers contest for the Lion’s Club in high school. It was a typical high school speech, about what America means to me. I gave an example of a shipwreck where everyone comes on shore and the first thing you have to do is take an inventory of what you’ve got. You’re stranded on an island, so you have to be resourceful. The first community that lands has to be socialistic to survive, but then two or three generations later, you have the choice of two or three different shoes, two or three different carpenters. That’s like America. There is competition and the result is that the consumer gets better choices. I know that’s a high school mentality, but it’s funny, what America means to me really hasn’t changed much.

Q: You got into the wine business in an unconventional way: You were a business consultant and took over a company that owed money to a grape-growing client of yours. All you got out of the deal was wine in bulk and bottling services. Where did you go from there?

A: We didn’t have a name, a label and we didn’t know anything about wine marketing. We wound up going to another Oakland guy, Don Brown, who was the buyer for Lucky stores and I said, “Don, what should this look like, what do you need?” He told me, “It wants to have a name that people can pronounce and the image has to be the same as the name, and you have to see it from 4 feet away, and you should put it in a big bottle because there’s too much competition in regular-sized bottles, and it needs to be a red and white combination.” I thought, “I can do that. That’s what I have!”

Q: Why Barefoot?

A: I had a friend named Davis Bynum who had a label called Barefoot and he wasn’t using it anymore. I remembered that label. I said, “Davis, what are you doing with the old Barefoot label?” He said, “I haven’t used that in 10 years. I’m doing fine Pinot Noir now.” I said, “Would you mind if I took that label over?” He said I’d have to pay him for it.

Q: Whose foot is that on the label?

A: We didn’t like Bynum’s original label. Then we were going back and forth with an artist in L.A. but it was never to Bonnie’s liking. One day, she said, “I know where there’s a good footprint we can use. It’s on the end of my leg.” So she went down to the art store, got the largest inkpad she could find and sent the print of her foot to the artist and said, “I want it more like that.”

Q: OK, here’s the money question: Did you have wine for dinner last night, and if so, what was it?

A: Ah! Yes, I did. Not to plug Barefoot, but I like the Barefoot Lodi Zinfandel. It’s my favorite. You can get it for $6.99 and it’s from a wonderful grape-growing region—not Sonoma, not Napa, but Lodi, and it goes great with any kind of red meat or red pasta. I had it with red pasta with buffalo.

For information on The Barefoot Spirit book, visit www.thebarefootspirit.com.

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

The post Oakland Magazine Interviews Michael Houlihan appeared first on The Barefoot Spirit.